And happy birthday to greenhoodloxley, as well! May your day be wonderful and your year to come the best yet.

Thank you for joining me in my month-long holiday celebration. I truly hope you've enjoyed it - I have! If you want to catch up on anything you missed, you can read all of this year's Halloween posts by clicking here. For those of you who are newcomers to my blog, or those of you who missed it earlier this month, I especially invite you to take my virtual ghost tour of Lenoir-Rhyne University!

LINKS OF THE DAY: I have several links for your ghoulish Halloween enjoyment.

* And, last but not least, The Literary Gothic Archive is a treasure trove of "must read" literature for Halloween. It's worth bookmarking and revisiting again and again.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY: I hope you enjoy today's spooky poem!

"Hallowe'en in a Suburb"by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

The steeples are white in the wild moonlight, And the trees have a silver glare;Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly, And the harpies of upper air, That flutter and laugh and stare.

For the village dead to the moon outspread Never shone in the sunset's gleam,But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep Where the rivers of madness stream Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.

A chill wind weaves through the rows of sheaves In the meadows that shimmer pale,And comes to twine where the headstones shine And the ghouls of the churchyard wail For harvests that fly and fail.

Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change That tore from the past its ownCan quicken this hour, when a spectral power Spreads sleep o'er the cosmic throne, And looses the vast unknown.

So here again stretch the vale and plain That moons long-forgotten saw,And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray, Sprung out of the tomb's black maw To shake all the world with awe.

And all that the morn shall greet forlorn, The ugliness and the pestOf rows where thick rise the stones and brick, Shall some day be with the rest, And brood with the shades unblest.

Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark, And the leprous spires ascend;For new and old alike in the fold Of horror and death are penned, For the hounds of Time to rend.

And here's one last parting shot, as spoken by Orson Welles 70 years ago last night:

This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of The Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be: The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying "Boo!" Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night. . . so we did the best next thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember the terrible lesson you learned tonight: that grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian - it's Hallowe'en! - from The Mercury Theatre on the Air, The War of the Worlds, October 30, 1938

Thank you for joining me in my month-long holiday celebration. I truly hope you've enjoyed it. If you want to catch up on anything you missed, you can read all of this year's Halloween posts by clicking here.

Thank you for once again taking the time and effort to put on this not to missed Halloween treat. Even on the days I don't have the time to post, I always save the links for future reading and reference.

* New today from the The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Birth of 'Frankenstein': A new edition of the novel sheds light on the Shelleys' collaborative relationship.

Interesting! I didn't realize there was that much doubt as to Mary being the actual writing. I love the novel so much, I'm tempted to buy this in order to see just how much it was changed from the original.

* New from io9: "Where To Get Your Quick And Dirty Horror Movies - Free Online."